Stone by stone: Deconstructing and rebuilding innovation in Wales

It didn’t stop in Scotland of course. Not much does. In the Hundred Years’ war between England and France, across the battles of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, English and Welsh longbowmen killed perhaps 20,000 soldiers, thousands of knights and half a dozen or so princes for handfuls of their own losses. Indeed, England’s soldiers were more likely to die from dysentery than the poke of a French lance. Only the arrival of gunpowder displaced the bow as the ultimate leveller between rich and poor.

The Welsh didn’t invent the longbow. They took a stone age tool, improved it, and developed new techno-social structures – in what then passed for the military – to maximise its impact. Then the English came along, took it and supercharged it, in ways that were impossible for the Welsh. Not only were English kings able to integrate archers into a fully-featured military machine, and move that machine to continental Europe, but they were, at their best, able to coordinate financial and human resources, and modify behaviours across the entire ecosystem of medieval England to deliver an effective fighting force where and when needed. Edward Longshanks banned all Sunday sports across England apart from archery to ensure relevant skills were widespread and sharp, and as late as 1508 England banned the low-skill-required crossbow to ensure the longbow remained sovereign.

The Welsh king couldn’t do that. Hell, he didn’t even exist. The integration of the longbow into medieval warfare might have sent quite a few Anglo-Normans (and some of their horses) to an early grave, and even extended the independence of a few Welsh princedoms for a few years longer… but in the long term it made no difference at all. Why? Because Innovation, in its origins, and its place, and in its application and its benefits, is inherently contextual. And our context stinks.

Wales innovates (not)

Wales struggles with innovation – at least as commonly understood. Per capita spending on research, development & innovation is the lowest in the UK. Sectors, from farming through manufacturing to services, underperform in terms of capital investment, R&D and sheer dynamism. Higher education and public R&D pull up no trees. And none of this is new. Our industrial legacy is a raft of firms that are mostly either tiny, or large multinational facilities focussed on production or resource extraction – neither foregrounding innovation. The UK Government shovels science spending into the Golden Triangle. And government itself has become – in the UK and Wales by extension – a machine for allocating money, rather than bodies that actually domuch of anything. Our levels of qualifications and skills – an important driver of innovation – are poor.

Innovation is increasingly important for two reasons though: Firstly, it was earmarked by Vaughan Gething when Economy Cabinet Secretary as critical to the delivery on Wales’ national objectives in a strategy that sought to include public and civic bodies in the innovation landscape via a ‘missions’ approach. Secondly, at the other end of the M4 but still with a missions framing, Labour has focussed on economic growth in a way that makes a step-change in UK innovation performance, and hence productivity, central.

Both these approaches have limitations. In Wales, nothing is said about the changes to structures, incentives or funding that might actually encourage wider innovation. In London, there is (yet) little thought about how innovation and economic growth will make people’s lives better, beyond the obvious (but untrue) equivalence of increased economic growth and tax take with increased public spending. Innovation is, across much of the public and academic realm, posited as an unquestioned good. It isn’t.

Everything everywhere all at once? Really?

Last month two Harvard students described how they used a pair of unobtrusive Meta Ray Ban smart glasses to take photos of strangers’ faces, which were then automatically linked to an invasive face recognition database. Whereupon an LLM cross referenced with a variety of people-search databases to deliver intelligence on that person, including their name, address, and interests. The students even approached strangers and pretended to know them based on the information they had gleaned.
Innovative, no?

We have been trained to blithely think of innovation as positive and desirable. Which is a hard sell if you’re a Tesco cashier that’s just lost their job to a crappier, less chatty but cheaper self-swipe till. Successful innovation does not mean successful places. If you need convincing, just count the number of homeless people across Silicon Valley, or look at the backers of the 47th President of the USA. Or consider being a single female on a late train home as some creep stares at you through a pair of Zuckerberg’s latest AI toy.

Closer to home, we need to worry about how far R&D and innovation address the key issues we face, even if we do capture a decent proportion of innovation-related economic activity. Newport’s semiconductor cluster supports almost £400m of GVA, and 2,600 jobs, but Newport remains… well, Newport. It will take a lot of work to make an improved innovation performance touch the sides of Wales’ economic wellbeing needs, especially when innovation is clustered in the relatively wealthy (and urban) parts of the region, and liable to attracting labour from a lot further afield than Merthyr or Llandysul. And there is a risk that a focus on innovation – or at least innovation in pursuit of innovation for growth – risks further dilution of an economic narrative that already includes the foundational economy, the wellbeing economy, the circular economy, and a global-value-chain-climbing manufacturing action plan. Some of these are innovation friendly, or innovation-adjacent, but how is an open question.

We should also not forget that innovation is not costless. It requires organisations to divert staff, money and time away from the day-to-day to understand how to get there from here and start plotting a path. Immediate performance suffers for the long term good. This is hard. Not least for example in an NHS which was built for times when lives were shorter, and medicine simpler so now struggles… but wherein no-one has yet diverted sufficient resource into the obvious solution: preventative rather than ameliorative care, alongside of course a radically changed public health policy. Meanwhile, innovation challenges the value (and existence) of products, services and processes in organisations… and hence of the people in charge of the soon-to-be-obsolete bits. Those who have succeeded by clawing to the top of a particularly shaped organogram might not be overjoyed at the prospect of suddenly losing budget to – or heaven forbid reporting to – that weird nerd from the back cubicle who has written a whizz bang piece of code. Much easier just to… quietly lose the new ideas.

And of course, with innovation there is risk. We all know that Wales is more dependent on public sector employment and activity (and that in the closely associated third sector) than most regions. This is then a higher proportion of employees who will not – cannot – be rewarded for innovative thoughts with bonuses or promotions, but where the risk of getting it wrong is significant. who work in organisations where the watchwords are stewardship, safety, and spending public money wisely. Places where success then largely means getting the money out the door into safe hands by March 31st. The clearest example of this tension was perhaps when the regional development bank was given the extremely tough task of both encouraging growth and innovation in inherently risky firms, and turning a buck.

The future has been here forever

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can’t really do innovation, but our technocratic, linear notion of invention, innovation and technological time ignores reality, and ignores the fact that really, honestly, there’s already enough stuff out there. Raise your eyes from this screen a sec and look at the surrounding office/living room/pub/park bench/factory floor/S&M dungeon. How much of what you see and use was invented in Wales? Yep, nowt. So why do we spend swathes of time worrying about what we invent and innovate here, but (almost) none purposefully and systematically searching the world for cool new stuff – technical and social – that we could be adopting or adapting? When transformative innovations do arise, we adopt them by the force of multinational economic logic, not proactive public policy.

Take climate change. We are busy developing sophisticated regulation mechanisms to enable the roll out of marine renewables that are decades away from commercial viability, and looking forward to welcoming, um, community-scale nuclear, whilst failing to quickly roll out onshore wind and solar technologies that are already grid-competitive, in part because we understandably can’t get over the thought of disrupting our untouched rural landscape, dense with ancient broadleaf forests and teeming with lynx and aurochs; reverberating to the cries of white tailed eagles wheeling over the salmon-packed rivers [checks notes. throws notes in bin].

Love Treorchy? Want to see it thrive? There’s a cool little app for that. Want to create more Treorchys by, I dunno, the policy innovation of levelling the playing field a bit by taxing out-of-town shopping centre car parks? Nah.

Ask not what you can do for innovation, but what innovation can do for you

Innovation is, and will always be, difficult for Wales. It requires spare capital – human, financial, political, and organisational, capacity we simply don’t have. Where innovation does occur locally, it is – by virtue of our small, peripheral and boring economy, and lack of industrial diversity and economic ownership – unlikely to be applied locally. Thus we need to reverse the logic of the innovation question. Not to encourage it for the sake of, but take a good, hard look at where we are going and what’s needed to get there. Then we need to understand whether the technology, policy, or approach already exists somewhere, and whether we can obtain and apply it here in Wales. Only after this process will we be left with an ‘innovative gap’ that we might need to fill locally.

One obvious and important example: it’s a decent bet that within a decade, nobody will be dangerously obese in Wales. We will have taken huge strides towards our goal of a (physically) healthier Wales. This will happen because of GLP-1 and related drugs that were very much not invented here. The policy question is then clearly, not how Wales invents new drugs, but how we access these new tools in ways that are affordable for the entirety of a patient’s life. And how we ensure that the newly svelte population don’t just sit on the couch, but are encouraged use their improved mobility to engage in activities that improve the muscle mass, physical resilience and mental health that the drugs might leave unchanged. That is, we need to ask how we harness innovations to drive wider wellbeing.

We will of course at some points have to invent stuff. Let me again give you example.

I make no apologies for repeating myself. We need an education system that is forward-focussed. That teaches kids andgrownups how to learn. That creates a workforce – and citizens – fit for the future. We started on this a decade or so ago, but never followed through with a radical reassessment of qualification structures or the transition to tertiary education, meaning teachers can (and from family experience, do) teach to the exam and place a tight rein how kids gallop into courseworks). We are then left to worry about slipping down PISA rankings in maths and English in a world where AI is already acing the rules-based mathematics taught in schools and college, and moving on to proving theorems. A world where, somewhat depressingly, I can, no longer distinguish between a coursework written by a very good Master’s student, and one written by Chat-GPT. Taxi for Professor Jones please.

In Wales we control every bit of the education elephant, from the nursery trunk to the tiny adult tail. And what have we done to change this system, to prepare our people for a massively changed and challenged future? As my daughter sits in her Year 7 history class, learning about 1066-and-all-that; as my eldest did in 2017; as I did in 1982, I can only conclude the answer is… Nothing much.

If government can’t innovate, how can we expect anyone else to?

Conclusion

The new UK Government’s core focus on economic growth will, within the enduring institutional logic of UK government which always trumps party, see more focus on sectors, clusters, ‘high value’ activities, investment and exports. This inherently economic-competitive framing will create tensions with the (prior) Welsh Government approach that saw economic activity and innovation as part of a much wider system. Labour in Cardiff Bay might congratulate itself on coming to the ‘missions’ approach earlier than its UK HQ, but this a double-edged sword. The mission approach (as popularised) emphasises ambition, inspiration and boldness; high levels and big themes. It requires dynamic adaptability, and the deconstruction of silos to bring cross sector, discipline and learning. Systematic and cross cutting policy, consistency over time, and substantive community engagement. Vision. Headroom.

These are, unfortunately, all things that Welsh Governments have struggled with. In their absence, the notional adoption of mission-based innovation risks an ever-larger implementation gap, and a future full of even more strategies full of even more lovely case studies that are full of sound and fury; signifying nothing because levers of traditional innovation simply aren’t here, or can’t be pulled.

The alternative is (in theory) simple. Work out what kind of Wales we want and radically reshape our public policies to suit. Work out what approaches and technologies we need, and beg steal or borrow what we can – from wherever they are. Make sure best practice spreads. Then ask. What doesn’t exist that we need?

Only then should we look to bring new stuff into a world already collapsing under the weight of it.